Identifying harmful and inappropriate behaviours
Harmful and inappropriate behaviour can be subtle or overt and can manifest in different forms, such as bullying, harassment, or micro-aggressions.
Examples of these behaviours
We’ve put together some examples of different types of inappropriate behaviour to help you recognise these behaviours within your organisation.
Bullying
Title
Spreading malicious rumours about someone
Title
Constantly putting someone down in meetings
Title
Deliberately giving someone a heavier workload than everyone else
Title
Excluding someone from team social events
Title
Putting humiliating, offensive, or threatening comments or photos on social media.
Source: ACAS: Bullying at work
Example of bullying
Jerome has recently joined a new team at work. His new colleagues have not been very welcoming and hold team meetings without him. Jerome has missed several deadlines because he has not been attending the meetings and he is now on performance review. His colleagues continue to exclude him from team meetings and laugh amongst themselves whenever he attends progress meetings.
Harassment
Harassment and bullying are often conflated. Harassment, however, is covered by discrimination law (Equality Act 2010) and can be a serious hate crime.
Harassment can be behaviour that causes the victim to feel:
Title
Disrespected
Title
Frightened
Title
Humiliated
Title
Insulted
Title
Intimidated
Title
Threatened
Three types of harassment
Title
Harassment related to age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex and / or sexual orientation
Title
Sexual harassment that refers to unwanted sexual behaviours
Title
A person being treated less favourably because of how they’ve responded to previous harassment (e.g. reporting it).
Source: ACAS: Discrimination and the law
Example of harassment
(related to sex)
Clare is the only female mechanic that works in the garage. Whenever it's break time, her colleagues shout things like 'milk with two sugars, love' at her. It was funny the first couple of times, but now she feels disrespected and thinks they only treat her this way because she's a woman.
Micro-aggression
Micro-aggressions can take many different forms. For example:
Title
Repeatedly not pronouncing or spelling an individual’s name correctly
Title
Making assumptions about skills / abilities / temperament of an individual based on stereotypes
Title
Interrupting a person when they are speaking
Title
Ignoring individuals in meetings and in the workplace
Source: Rpharms.com: Microaggressions
Examples of micro-aggressions
